What if we all had to buy our groceries at the local convenience store? For about 23.5 million people in the U.S.—according to census data—who live in neighborhoods without easy access to fresh food, or “food deserts,” this is often a day-to-day reality.

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There’s a rapturous term thrown around by VR enthusiasts: “The Metaverse.” It is a term that comes from the seminal Neal Stephenson science fiction novel Snow Crash, where it described a kind of embodied virtual reality.